If I Were Single and Starting Over, This Is What I Would Do

if I were single and starting over this is how I'd find my partner the person you spend the rest of your life with will have the largest impact on who you become what you achieve and how happy you are but most people spend more time deciding what car they want to buy or what neighborhood they're going to live in than the person they're going to marry when I was in college there was a graph they put on the board in my economics class that said that there's a 71 correlation between your subjective well-being and the strength of your relationship with your significant other and if you pair that with amount of time spent with friends family kids alone and spouse over time alone and spouse go up and everything else crashes down to like almost nothing the person that you're going to spend the most amount of time for the rest of your life with is going to be your spouse the amount of single people that I see right now who are like H I don't want to be on the apps the apps don't work it's like we're talking about finding the one person you're going to be with for the rest of your life that you're going to spend the most amount of time with out of all humans by like a wide wide mark and you're like I don't want to go on more than 10 Dates it's like so you just want to spin the wheel 10 times to just pick whatever of the 10 that you get that you're like I guess this one doesn't suck and then that's it that's the rest of your life it's like I just want the rest of my life to kind of not suck it's kind of like the inverse of selling like in sales you have a pipeline and you know what your conversion percentages are the thing with finding significant other is you only need to find one and I remember when I was way younger like in high school going to college where you know some girls like what are you looking for we're like on a date thing and it did not go the way she was expecting um I was just like these are all the things I'm looking for and she was really discouraged looks like you're just trying to find a unicorn I was like only have to find one I think I believe in having exceptionally high standards only second to the standards you hold yourself to so either you've got like Camp number one I'll take anyone with a pulse that's one way to do it you're just going to get the scraps of society which sucks Camp two which is probably the more prevalent one which is why so many people are struggling is I want to have this amazing person but I suck but they should be so amazing that they should see me for who I am deep down like deep no deeper even deeper like really deep down they should be able to see that right even though I'm [ __ ] up and I don't have a job and I'm overweight and i' never stick with my commitments and I never follow through like besides all that and I lie sometimes you know what I mean that I haven't been faithful for like past relationships but still and I'm not complimentary and like I don't have any values that that they aspire to be I actually really have nothing going for me but besides all of that deep deep down I'm amazing they just knew how to look that's like Camp too and I feel like that's a lot of people and then Camp 3 is you know I I saw this meme that went like all over the Internet which is you can consolidate all of the relationship guru's dating advice to be successful and they were they were making fun of that yes that that is at the at the end of everything that's it 100 different hacks and most of them are about deception like realistically like most of the like dating hacks that I see are about posturing and perceiving you know making people see you a certain way but but the thing is is like on a long enough time R they're going to figure out who you are and so like it's short-term longterm and so people don't want to do the harder long-term work of just like being somebody worth being with and want to find out how they can like optimize their dating profiles and don't get me wrong like it's an ad so get nice images sure like maybe spend 5 minutes on what you're going to have every single Potential Prospect in your life see okay that makes sense the real work is like okay you go on the date now what right like you still have to like be somebody that somebody might want to be with so I'm a big like big Domino believer which is like if I solve this one big thing can I make all of the rest of these things go away I can do a 100 tiny tweaks and hacks to try and find a girl who's out of my league or I can just make myself so worthy that I can get any girl no matter what league she's in and if I just do that the rest I don't I don't need to optimize my profile I don't need to have I don't need to have all these things because if I just have that I'm fine and so I've just I've tended to try and find that one thing in business in Fitness in relationships um and that serve me pretty well my dad told me this when I was single he said everyone has a type and you'll date plenty of people who are that type but the chances are that you're not going to marry your type because if you were then you wouldn't have a type you'd have a wife and I found that really interesting because if you keep dating the same type of person and you're like this is my type then it is probably a good signal that that type of person isn't the person you end up with because you still keep dating them if you have been dating one type of person then you finally get with somebody else and it's very different it doesn't necessarily mean that's bad if anything it might actually be the type of person you end up marrying and I just find that as a really interesting frame for thinking through mate selection you know we date people who fill one clear role or one clear look especially when you're younger it's just I mean at least for me it was just like how hot is this person or whatever but over time you realize that like you date someone a little bit on the edge and you're like oh I liked all these other things that the people I normally don't have and then all of a sudden you start branching into very different types of people and kind of in some ways appreciating cuz I I would say I've I've dated a more diverse selection of people than I've been friends with I would say friends like anyone who's friends with me is very narrowly interested in certain types of things but people I dated I was willing to date people were far outside of that sphere of confidence and so even though I currently now am married to somebody who is in that sphere of like business and hardcore and all that stuff I feel like I I got a a big appreciation for lots of different cultures ethnically but also like psychograph of deeply religious people like I dated people who were deeply religious before and so I have a really good appreciation for that and so I wouldn't have had that exposure had I not been willing to kind of break the type I think being able to pick and judge people is one of the most valuable skills you can ever develop and it's one of the hardest ones to develop because it takes pattern recognition getting burned I'm going to lean into this like judging people is fine you have to assess someone how are you going to assess them without judging them the difference is calling them good or bad like getting an accurate assessment of who someone is or what they do is totally fine and it's human to do that and I think it's it's necessary and so this this idea of like you should never judge anyone it's like you should judge everyone you just NE don't necessarily need to measure yourself against them I feel like you're only going to be able to recognize patterns if you put yourself out there and you're willing to have terrible first dates and terrible second dates uh for an extended period of time because you might find out that there's like a whole set of character traits that you didn't even know were important to you and then you find them and you're like whoa this is now way more important than all the other stuff that I used to think was important I only found that stuff out cuz like it's really hard to even hear podcasts like this and be like okay what do I do with this like it is just exposure you can make judgments on people even outside of a romantic relationship of like man I like this person that I worked with like what are the traits that I like about this person and trying to like really pinpoint those like I I learned that I really liked a woman who respected me and who followed traditional gender roles uh those are things that are super important to me that I didn't know were important to me I only found that out kind of later I I I needed someone who does not get in the way of my goals if I had somebody who who was felt like I was taking by pursuing my goals I knew it would never work long term because I can't have my entire life be a take for somebody else I'll never be able to to flip that that balance so like I I need someone who literally doesn't even see it as a take not someone who's like you can take as much as you want that still doesn't work cuz the paradigm's wrong like they have to see it as a give like they have to see me working as doing as fulfilling my duty to our household and I want them to judge me on that and so making sure that the person you're with judges you by the metrics that you judge yourself on you might be spending all this time effort optimizing towards what you think you should be judged on but if they're judging you on completely different metrics you're screwed you'll never win and so there's always going to be this huge disconnect this huge gap where they're like you could be doing more and you're like how can I possibly do more but it's because you're actually judging against different outcomes making sure that the things that they expect of you and the things that you expect of you are the same and then they should be supporting you because they want those things from you too and then that way you can work in Synergy towards what you're trying to accomplish together uh rather than feeling there's always this give take cuz like really really super honestly like Lea and I don't really have a give take relationship we both just like want the same thing I never want her to think I could have done more or I could have worked harder or I left anything on the field and so I think that's been a source of mutual respect is that we're both harder on ourselves than the other person is on us and so we're always out outdoing the other person's expectations because we're both assessing on the same metrics if you want to be the ultimate husband find a woman who loves all the things that you currently do way less work than trying to change everything about who you are to match what they want from you the amount of times I was in relationships where the things that they wanted me to do I was like this isn't me like I can't expend effort to do this but I don't want to on a forever basis because I will resent you but the thing is that there's another guy who would love to do that and probably does it on his own and they should marry him and so I think just being like really really really brutally honest about what do you really want out of me and what do you expect like what's a 10 out of 10 husband look like to you and if it matches what I already do or what I'm planning to do then it makes both of our lives a lot easier because I'm going to work my ass off on what I already want to do and it will just so happen to F fulfill all of your desires but I think way too many people spend time in this like compromise Zone where neither person gets what they want even if both of you compromise you're not enjoying the thing that you're compromising on they're getting a worse version of what they ideally want and you're just walking out this like kind of middle path when I think both people could be better served by being brutally honest up front and being okay with somebody being an amazing person just not their amazing person you know one of the biggest things that I hate about romance advice and relationship advice in general in the whole Space which is why I try not to touch it is that there is no objective measure for a relationship billionaire so like somebody else can be married or in a relationship and I make a piece of content and they're like well you're [ __ ] wrong because of X Y and Z and I'm like things is that there's no way that anyone externally can see how healthy a relationship is internally and so that's what I think makes it so hard about the space cuz the only success metric we have is not divorced the vast majority of marriages that I see I would not want at all Roy southernland said this which I think is actually really interesting he talked about how realtors Realtors should be advertising the negative aspects of a property to allow people to make better decisions if you say hey it's you know I'm next to the pub area for some people that's going to be a no-go Zone but for somebody who likes the night life then it's going to be a pro but all Realtors do is talk about the plus sides but what you really want is the Arbitrage between something that you are fine with that would quote devalue your property that someone else isn't fine with and that's where the the mismatches or the better matches actually happen I think to the same degree people could approach dating that way which is rather than say all the good things like I'm hardworking I'm in shape whatever state all the downsides because if all of your downsides someone's like those things don't bother me me that becomes a very strong relationship or has the makings of a strong relationship because then there's all the things that everyone is complaining about of you if they're cool with it then they only get upside if I'm fine with being on the bars when it's late next to the Metro even though there's noise because I work from an office and I don't I'm not home during the day um if I'm a you know I'm a guy and I'm not worried about being in a rougher neighborhood cuz no one's going to you know necessarily approach me versus an a single girl who's 100 lb then that probably that house my match with that house is probably a good deal for me I'm probably get I'm going to probably get a steal on the house and so you want to get a steal on a partner is like all these things is what other people were bothered about [ __ ] I love all that [ __ ] or I'm fine with all of it like you work too much cool me too I we work together uh people kind of don't like that I'm like kind of particular about what I eat and like I want to you know stay in shape cool me too awesome and so just take all the negatives and find somebody who thinks as negatives are positives or at least neutral and then like how much effort are you put in the relationship you're just being you and they just like you for you and I think that's way more about like what is liking someone for who they are it's that and it's not like I don't think it's this whole journey of like they suck at these things but I accept them it's more like everyone else thinks the suck about them but I'm cool with it I think that's a much stronger frame the person whose opinion matters the most to me is hers like her hers carries the most weight so if she's like you crushed that it means a lot more to me than 500,000 strangers saying I crushed it because if she said then like she knows what I'm capable of whereas for many people who don't know you anything that's better than what they would do they would consider a success but their bar is much lower than mine is and so she knows what my bar is and she has a high bar too and so that's why it it matters more like the reason that she's probably not writing a book anytime is because she knows how much work I put into it and she's like I'm afraid it's not going to be as good as one of yours on the flip side she's so much better at running a company she's so much better at leading she's so much better at managing she's so much better at interacting with people selling ideas to the team I'm great at selling ideas to the public she's created selling ideas to the team and so completely different skill set and so I um and like when she does Great Stuff with the team like I just I just appreciate her and all the stuff that she does I would say that for me appreciation believe it or not actually comes really easily in romantic relationships like showering with praise like I I've always been good at that doing other stuff like gifts [ __ ] you know like acts of service tougher for me but like telling you did a good job I'm your guy even within the people that we date we should still have priorities of like what is the most important what's second most important and if you're like well they're all important then it means that you need to clarify your priorities cuz nothing everything can't be a priority this is literally strategy and business everything's important but some things are still more important than others and if you can't get clear on what the priorities are for you then how the [ __ ] do you expect your spouse or your partner or the person you're dating to figure out what's important for you if you can't even figure it out and so if you're clear on here's my checklist of tactics that mean a lot to me and then here's my checklist on goals or character traits or activities that mean a lot to me if they if they sacrifice a number three to keep doing doing number one you can't be upset about that because that was the tree that you decided to make now if they show you some three awesome it's gravy but the number one still has to stay number one for her me having big goals and being ambitious just was the number one thing that she was attracted to and I was like good cuz that's the thing that's not going to change now these other things if I have time or I have headp space or I remember I do them but I also forget all the time I forgot her birthday the first year we were married I also forgot mine I can't believe you would do that to your wife I was like I also did it to me I like me too so like what does that say it's making sure you understand the trade-offs you're making and then not being upset after the fact at the price tag for the Nikes that you chose to buy it cost 500 bucks either get the Nikes or don't complain about the price you can't have both I think really clearly stating you want this the cost of this is this are you okay with that if you're not this won't work because I too want this but I understand the cost is this and I'm willing to pay the cost but are you willing to pay it too and I think if that person is not willing to pay it then they are not supporting your long-term goals and then if you play it out and you don't achieve your long-term goals who do you blame you'll resent them and if you're an amazing stoic you'll blame yourself but realistically you'll probably just resent them so I have I have a friend who has been single for a long time he was dating somebody for you know a few years he was like how do you just stick with one person he's obviously successful guy in shape whatever like a Chad right who can who can get girls you know we' gone back and forth and I just try to consolidate it into one statement I added the other two on later what I told him is I was like you just trade novelty for loyalty like you you give up novelty but what do you get if you give up novelty but then you don't have loyalty yeah it's a bad [ __ ] trade but if you get loyalty for me I value loyalty arguably even above law loyalty as we have defined it is your ability to predict Behavior like if someone is loyal it means that I have a high ability to predict their future Behavior if someone is disloyal then they I might not know what they're doing and that's not a controlling thing it's it's just like does does somebody act in accordance to the statements that they've made you trade exploration for trust right like you can explore all these things but then you don't really trust anyone but if you stop exploring then you start paying you start investing in time into one thing and I think the dividends of that time is trust and then you trade like this is from a day-to-day activities perspective you trade the chase of chasing tail chasing women chasing men whatever for a journey together so one is you kind of on the hunt and the other is with you someone by side going towards someplace so rather than you going towards people you're with someone already going towards an idea or a goal or an outcome or a purpose and so for me those were trades that I was willing to make basically the moment I thought I wouldn't be able to marry someone I stopped seeing them I had mul girls big like not to be weird but like being like let's get married let's do this and I was like I don't think I want to and then that was it but it saved me a lot of time and saved them a lot of years and so I also think it's an ethical thing and this is this is more message to guys and really just message to the Chads out there so take it for what it is but like I I genuinely do not like when a guy pretends like he might do something later when he knows that he's not going to want to have kids or he's not going to want to get married and the girl is there waiting hoping I don't like that cuz to me it's a lie I State the facts and tell the truth is probably like one of my big comeback toos in everything in life especially hardships it's like if you have a hard conversation State the facts and tell the truth like I don't want to marry you if you would like to hang out with me in the meantime while you find someone with that but I want to be clear that this is my intention if it evolves into something later cuz you magically change maybe but probably not and I think that people can't have that hard conversation because they're cowards that being said if you prefer novelty to loyalty and you prefer exploration to trust and you prefer the chase to a journey then you shouldn't get married like I I have no I have no qualm one way or the other that was just a tradeit I was willing to make with this particular person it'd be hard for me to find another Lea your spouse marries to two people the person you are and the person that you want to become make sure that they love both sometimes they meet you in today but where you're going is somewhere very different tomorrow and so it comes back to the idea of change versus growth which is if they want you to grow then it's being more of what you already are in the direction you're already growing if they want you to change they want you to be someone different towards a different end goal and so I think a lot of people kid themselves this happens I think more women towards men than men towards women to be honest but like women will try and like he's a project it's like that's a [ __ ] terrible way to live life like dear God making the person that you are committed to a project it means that they don't either love who you are they don't love who you're going to become most people have been in only like three or four major relationships in their life before they get married and a lot of times it's just like the person who was there at the time when they were old enough that they should get married like that's really what happens most of the time which is why most marriages are nonsp spectacular but I think if you went on a 100 dayses you probably have a way better idea of the types of people the character trates out there the interest that you might be able to potentially share with someone and just not basically just not settling just being willing to say no to good and good not being good enough most people have an idea of their aspirations and their goals if those are your aspirations and your goals hopefully you share them with your spouse or the person that you want to be married to and if that person is aligned with those aspirations and goals then they should be aligned with you paying the price to achieve them it just comes down to that like if they if they're willing if they love the person you want to become then they're going to be willing to do with the sacrifice that it will take to get where it becomes an issue I think is where people don't know what they want to do with their lives and to me that's a you problem that you need to solve cuz otherwise you're just basically a a rolled Dice and the other person's a rolled Dice and then you roll them later in your relationship and you find out that you want different things which I think honestly counter to popular opinion I think that's a perfectly fine reason to not be with somebody and for some reason you're it's okay to break up with somebody when you're not married because you want different things but then if you find out later that you want different things when you're married it's not okay if Leila came to me tomorrow and was like I want to live on a farm and not work and do whatever I'd be like that's going to be tough I'd try and convince her otherwise but like that would be tough cuz it would just it I was like that's a price I'm not willing to pay because what I'd be sacrificing is my dream of who I want to be because at the end of the day like your spouse can either be a liability or an asset and a reminder is that liabilities decline in value over time assets increase in value I recommend choosing the latter that is why growth is so important to me from uh picking a spouse perspective because women's status declines in time they're most attract acve at you know 20 to 30 years old and then it declines in time if you use Society standards they have to have other ways of providing value I would rather be with somebody who's continually getting better continually working on themselves continually trying to get new skills get New Perspectives new experiences whatever and somebody who's going to stagnate and just basically ride the coattails of their genetic Lottery which unfortunately I feel a lot of like entrepreneur or you know wealthy guys that I know like they just pick somebody who wanton a genetic Lottery they're just instead of being a trust fund kid it's a it's a it's a beauty trust fund girl they just were born beautiful they have nothing else cuz they never needed to and that sucks so there's a stat that always gets thrown around that more than half of marriages end in divorce but it's a little bit misleading because it's actually significantly lower for first-time marriages so first-time marriages have like a 30% chance of divorce third fourth Etc I think second is like 70 and third is like 80 or something it's very high very very high so so the reality is that the people who get married many times skew the stats because the divorce rate is based on marriages not based on people but yeah so there is this illusion that like you know all marriages in but like if it's your first marriage you've got a seven and a 10 shot of staying married till one of you dies I feel like that's a little bit more encouraging yeah I mean I see I I like the I like the term partner even though it's like considered like woke or something now I think but I like the term partner or life partner because of what it like really entails more than spouse or wife or husband because what you're really signing up for is somebody who's going to partner with you for life and so like if you had a business partner you'd want somebody who had you know contrasting skills with to you but had the same goal like if you have a partner like you want to build this amazing thing together they should want to go the same place as you they should want to have the same values as you is getting there but they should have complimentary skills that's what picking a good partner looks like in business and it looks the same in marriage if you find a true partner then the sum of the whole is greater than its parts I would say the vast majority of relationships one or the other is a liability and is a is a weight against the other person and the person who's in the relationship would be better off if they were alone and so that's kind of how I measure that's how I would measure relational success is how how much more valuable is the sum than the individual parts and so I think the people who get the biggest Delta between who they are individually versus who they are together that's what I would deem is the measure of a successful relationship how much better are they together I love this is analogy from Gary ve cheerleaders don't ask the quarterback to leave the game when the game's on the line a good spouse clears the way on the field or cheers from the sidelines to support you but you know what they never do ask you to leave the game when the game's on the line and the thing is I see so many so many spouses who when the game's on the line and the person's been putting all this time in to achieve the goal that they said matter to them then says I also have this other goal that matters to me too I'm changing the rules on you and I think that creates a lot of conflict it's like I'm trying to win the way that I thought we both said we wanted to win but now you're saying that halfway through the game or when I'm at the 10 yard line that touchdowns don't matter anymore that for me if someone did that and meant it I would run the other way cuzz you can't win honestly most relationships are one person's watching from home with the game in the background while they're doing other stuff blowing up the person's phone while they're on the sidelines before like an important point that they need to win saying all these things that aren't going to help them or even actively hope that they their spouse's team loses so they can finally come home because they changed the rules and said this is actually winning now but then when they're home they say why aren't you winning on the field and if you're with somebody who can't get straight what they want from you find someone who does I had a I had a relationship that I was super into for a very long time but at the end of the day they wanted different things out of life they were like these are the goals that I have and I was like these are the goals I have and like we amicably split I was like I hope you get all that stuff I'm not the guy for that but I hope you get it cuz if that's not a line then like we're just going to run into conflict later cuz one of us is going to have to give if there's two separate goals one person's goal is is going to have to give or you have the same goal and then you both give all you have to that one goal and so rather than being detractors the efforts become additive and then they stack on top of each other which is why the whole value of relationship or the strength of relationship is based on how much better they are together versus apart at the end of the day I think we all need someone who believes in us as much or more than we believe in ourselves bonus points if they are your spouse and double bonus points if uh you're that person for them if the if the whole point is to get the sum of the whole to be greater than the parts they have to believe that you can be better than you are and it's about being better not different than who you are and I think that's a big delineation that gets confused like they Define you being more the way I want you to be as better but it's really just different than who you are but if it's I want you to be more of who you are then that's better and if that better is also their better that's when I think the magic happens and if you can also do that for them then I think you have a really virtuous cycle of both people reinforcing one another to become better versions of the self themselves align with the goal that both of you already pre-agreed to saying that you wanted I think everyone should have obscenely high standards for the one person they're going to spend the rest of their life with but you can only have those obscenely high standards if you hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold them to Big goals plus big work equals ambitious big goals plus lazy equals entitled and I think most people feel entitled to an amazing spouse but they aren't ambitious about how they want to pursue them and so I think if we replaced a lot of this basically being mediocre and complaining about the mediocre selection you have with how do I hold myself to a higher bar than I'd hold my spouse to my future spouse too I think you'll find that future spouse but it's probably three or four iterations from who you currently are to deserve or be worthy of that spouse I think um Leila had someone asked her not in a weird way they're like how would I be able to get a girl like you she came to me afterwards and she was like I didn't want to say the mean thing which is like I would never be with someone like you like that's the real I think most of better marriages comes from becoming better people better people then are attracted to better people which then means that you have the very hard work of looking yourself in the mirror and saying like where am my deficient and if it's everywhere you start with the most important one and you start there I'm much wealthier now that my wife is in my life I'm in much better shape than when I met Ila I'm much less angry than when I met Lea I'm more patient than when I met Lea I'm Kinder than when I met Lea I have far more endurance and far more longsuffering and I experience a lot more joy in my life than when I met her there's no almost no stat that I have that has gone down if you find someone that is taking you away from more than one of your goals especially if they are priorities for you I think you're far less likely to change them and it' be far easier to find someone who is

Channel: Alex Hormozi

Views: 682,037

Keywords: Alex Hormozi, Alex Hormozi Business Tips, Alex Hormozi Gym Launch Secrets, Hormozi, Business guides, Business tips, Skillsets, Skill Stacking, The Game Podcast, mozination

Id: jiCGLDhUCHY

Length: 27min 8sec (1628 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024